Yeah I'm giving up on The Windup Girl

     I've ended up reading everything but Paolo's "steampunk" novel. I can no longer renew it as some poor fool has a hold on it. It's so boring! I have several more chapters I've read and written about so I'll post them eventually but I can't go on right now. I have no interest in the trade and politics, the cynical premise and stereotyped characters, or the 70s setup. I don't care what happens to any of the characters. On to better books!

     I finished Fred Vargas' Have Mercy On Us All. Good book, gets kind of dark when it goes into the plague spreader's reasons but the melange of backstories and damaged characters makes a pretty, tangled mess. I'll have to continue reading the series.

     I also read Ice Moon by Jan Costin Wagner. Wagner is German married to a Finnish woman so the story is set in Finland with one character from Germany. This book was eh. The main detective's wife dies of a long illness in the beginning of the book and this colors his perceptions of the investigation into a series of deaths by smothering. We get chapters from the serial killers perspective which seem to consist entirely of single sentences as paragraphs. There's a number of chapters from the POV of one of the victim's summer flings who flies to Finland when he learns that she's dead and he inherited her apartment. The woman is portrayed as energetic, special, happy, and bright but her focus on some guy she met years ago and never saw or heard from again is just a tad creepy. The one thing I found interesting was how surprised other people were at how easily she talks to strangers. I think this might be a cultural thing because striking up conversations with people you don't know is practically taught from birth here. Also, the main character muses a couple times about how one of his colleagues is so cheerful he's hard to take seriously because upbeat people are seen as superficial and stupid. Apparently smiling = dumb and frowning/neutral = serious. It's a decent, short read but it's kind of repetitive.

      I also read The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney, a first novel by a screenwriter. It takes place in 1867 in the Northwest territory. A man is murdered and a woman's teenage son goes missing and a whole bunch of people stomp off into the wilderness to go find him. The writing is generally good though she has a bit of trouble with tenses changing not just in the middle of paragraphs but also in the middle of sentences. She also seems to forget that we can't see who's talking or what facial expressions they're making. There are too many characters. Line, the Norwegian woman who runs from the religious community that took her in, is entirely without purpose. One of the main characters, Daniel Moody, basically does absolutely nothing and people just generally seem to have a 21st century mindset, especially about religion. Basically none of the plot points are resolved and a seemingly important thread about a bone tablet goes absolutely no where. However, the writing was atmospheric and descriptive and the main character, Mrs. Ross, was sympathetic and strong so it was a pretty good read despite the problems.

      I'm about to finish A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers which is absorbing and obnoxious by turns. More on that later.

The Windup Girl chapters 13 - 14

Chapter 13:

Jaidee remembers meeting and courting his wife. Then he goes to the Ministry to make an apology for being a thieving, destructive jackass. The punishment is harsher than I expected but actually more in line with real-life consequences. He did, after all, accept bribes (even if he didn't keep his end of the bargain) and destroy private property. (He also beats private citizens up.) Most of the cargo he torched was legit. He's sentenced to nine years doing penance as a monk while his children are relegated to Ministry care.

The most appalling facet of his public apology? Foreigners are present.
"Foreigners inside the Ministry compound. Traders and factory owners and Japanese, sunburned sweating stinking creatures, invading the Ministry's most sacred place." P.142.

The horrors! And yet I really think we're supposed to like this guy. Honestly, I see what he's trying to do but when it's offensive with one set of races it doesn't magically become okay when you flip things. At least I hope he's trying something that intelligent rather than trying to accurately portray Thai people because that would just be offensive. I mean it's already offensive but...Let's move on.

Chapter 14:

The aftermath of Jaidee's demotion from Anderson's POV. The foreigners who lost cargo have been paid reparations and one of them acts like a drunk idiot. Anderson talks with Carlyle and meets with Trade Minister Akkarat. Akkarat has a rivalry with Jaidee's boss, Pracha. Anderson and Akkarat talk about a possible deal: support from Anderson's company in exchange for samples from Thailand's genetic seed bank.

"Your people have tried to destroy mine for the last five hundred years."

"Ever since your first missionaries landed on our shores, you have always sought to destroy us. During the old Expansion your kind tried to take every part of us. Chopping off the arms and legs of our country...With the Contraction, your worshipped global economy left us starving and over-specialized." P.150. 

Somebody, either Akkarat or Paulie, has a very tenuous grasp on history and logic. This is just...silly. He's conflating Americans with all Westerners which is a very simplistic and unfair way of viewing things. Not all Americans have a white, Christian, European background and we certainly have nothing to do with anything that the Europeans did. Also, I missed the part where our country has done bad things to Thailand or forced them to specialize. Agency, remember? God forbid countries be held accountable for their own decisions. I mean, somebody pull out the tiny violin. And again, the imputation that free trade is evil. WTF?

Okay. I also read Andrea Camillieri's The Snack Thief. Montalbano gets a case where a man is knifed in the elevator of his apartment and this leads him to a shooting on a fishing boat, a Tunisian cleaning woman and her four year old son. The plot was a bit confusing but at the end there's one of those "Let me sum up" speeches which helps immensely.

Right now I'm reading Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas. I read The Chalk Circle Man and enjoyed it once I realized it was almost a parody of police procedurals. The main character Adamsberg relies more on intuition than interviews or forensics. He lets others handle that. There is much more philosophizing and musing on the meaning of life and things but it's engrossing all the same. In both books the crime starts with odd but non-criminal things that disturb Adamsberg enough to look into them. Inevitably they both turn into something deadly. The book I'm reading now has a guy pretending he's releasing the plague on Paris, complete with disturbing messages and preventative symbols painted on doors.

It's a good thing that Vargas was on my list of authors to read before I read Patrick Anderson's review of her most recent book to be translated into English. Here's what he said: "Although Vargas is hugely popular in Europe, she remains largely unknown in the United States, a discrepancy I must attribute to the high degree of intelligence, sophistication and perversity that informs her fiction."

Lines like this reveal a hell of a lot more about the people who write them than about the subject of the sentence. Pat is either trying to shame people into reading the book by telling them they're too dumb to like it or he's congratulating himself and others who already read the books for being smart enough to appreciate them. The first isn't going to work. I don't know why critics seem to think that telling people they're stupid heathens will get them to read things the critics like but it doesn't allow for personal taste. "You don't like it? Well, I guess you just didn't understand." *Sigh* I encountered this attitude so much during the time I worked in the museum that I'm immune to it now. It's silly and childish. There's a difference between understanding something and liking it. If someone doesn't like something you enjoy it isn't a personal attack on you. And really, you don't need other people's confirmation that a book or work of art really is good before you enjoy it. Telling people they aren't intelligent if they don't like something is mean-spirited.

 The second reason he could have included that sentence can be summed up by a line from The Princess Bride: "Yes, you're very smart, now shut up."

 (I was always amused when tourists would ask me if I "got" Mark Rothko. What they were really asking me was, "Is it all right if I don't like Rothko?" I would explain Rothko's color fields as best I could with the disclaimer that I don't personally like them. People sometimes need reassurance that they aren't philistines if they don't like something considered great. Acting all snobbish about it will just push people away since they won't want to reveal themselves to disdain and then they have no incentive to learn anything new since the work will just bring feelings of shame and embarrassment.)

I think the Title is the hardest part really

Me and my Grandpa.

I can now close the stacks part of the library while keeping the computer lab open so I can more easily go to lunch when I want. It's wonderful to have more control over my schedule again.

I've been doing catalog entry. I've done about 100+ books at his point and there are at least 300 to go. And then, once I get tape I can label them all! Yippee! I've been using the Populi library system that's connected to their college management software program since that's what the school already uses. Adding resources to the catalog is pretty simple. It lets you enter something by ISBN number and it pulls information from Amazon. This gives you a more or less full description of the contents for your resource page along with the authors and publisher. You have to enter all other data by hand. The resource page when created is not particularly streamlined but there are a lot of different field options. Except a series field for some reason. And you can't delete a resource or change it's status between available and unavailable. Apparently they're working on changing that. Sometimes it just refuses to enter things correctly at all and you just have to work around it.

You can, of course, assign multiple subjects of your own wording to each item and to be honest I only sometimes use LCSH or MeSH. I don't have thousands of books and I don't want there to be fifty different subject headings with only one item linked to them. These things are to help users find similar items or to let them browse for a useful topic. The wording needs to be something they'll think to look up. There's no way I'm putting the APA manual under the heading "Psychological Literature". Who's going to look for help with citations under that? Also, there's no reason to limit myself to three subjects when four will be better. I want things to be interconnected in such a way that when students browse the catalog they find things they hadn't thought to look at but find useful. I'll have to conduct a survey after they've been using it for awhile to make sure it works.

Yesterday I created an APA citation help sheet for the students and I've helped a couple that were sent by their teacher for instruction. I'm looking into how to make video tutorials for using online databases and to help teach reading comprehension and evaluative skills. I have no budget so I downloaded Windows Live Movie Maker and I'm thinking about getting CamStudio. I've also come to the realization that since the library is one of the only open doors on the hall I'm going to have to be ready to help not just students but anyone else who wanders in looking for information of whatever nature.

I'm almost done with Red Lights. It's just one long night for Steve the protagonist. He gets progressively drunker as he and his wife make the trip up to Maine to pick up the kids until eventually he decides his wife needs a lesson in understanding him when she objects to his stopping at bars along the way. He takes the keys with him into the bar to prevent her from driving off without him, which she threatened to do, and comes back out to find her gone. More drinking, one escaped convict, and lots of embarrassing drunken rambling about being men later and Steve wakes up in the car with a flat tire, missing luggage and wallet, a bad hangover, and no idea where his wife is. When he reaches a phone it turns out she never made it to where she was going. So he has to find her.

The narrative kind of feels like the passing of the highway under tires and also, unsurprisingly, like a drunken night out. It's a monotonous, nighttime journey, where roadside places are indistinct and very human emotions of hurt, annoyance, and confrontation come to the surface as the road wears on with nothing to do but watch traffic. Things start out very clear and get more and more blurry and less cohesive as Steve loses it, until he wakes up painfully alert with a squirrel watching him through the windshield. And then comes the shame, because he made a fool of himself, and the anxiety at being far from home with his wallet gone, and then the panic because he can't find his wife.

Three day weekend

I'm taking care of the animals while my parents sort things out at our other house. Our dog has an infected cut on her foot and an ear infection so I have this entire regimen for treating her twice a day. Poor thing hates being left alone; she insists on being wherever I am, even waiting outside the bathroom door while I shower. She takes it hard when my parents are gone. She does wake me up in the middle of the night, however, and that gets old quickly. Then this morning my mother's alarm went off at 5:45. Half-asleep, fumbling with the buttons on that huge-ass thing she calls a clock radio I thought I'd managed to shut it off but it started up again a few minutes later and...well I think I might need to buy her a new one.

Work is tiring and a little bewildering. I still have no idea how much money they're willing to spend on resources. They want databases and journals but anything you buy for institutional use is hellishly expensive. Even a subscription for a once every two months journal from LWW through Ovid costs $1088 for full onsite access. If you pay $288 you can onsite access for one IP address. One! You may as well buy an individual subscription for the print edition if only one person can use it at a time. There are far fewer options for small institutions and I'm going to have to convince my bosses that free resources can be just as good. Make use of everything you can. Many journal sites allow you to view a number of free articles and Medscape and Pubmed are free to use. Netlibrary seems to be reasonably priced but they already have ebrary. I'm in contact with EBSCO about a couple of their databases so we'll see how that pans out. I'm just a little tired of talking to these people when I know we probably don't have the money to afford what they're offering.

I still need a new computer and the IT guys haven't fixed the printer for the students. I can use the printer fine which means I can print out call numbers but I have no tape. I've requested book tape so we'll see if I get that in a timely manner. I am also apparently in charge of faculty development so I've been looking for good books on curriculum and syllabus creation and planning seminars on using internet resources like ERIC. I want to find out more about the student population to judge what would be best useful for them.

Less reading, more movie watching. I finished Tropic of Cancer. It was amusing and I liked the writing though it wasn't always stellar. This was an early book though so maybe it improves. I'll have to read Tropic of Capricorn. The Tao te Ching was excellent; I'll have to read a more literal translation though for comparison purposes. Kismet was entertaining. There were cultural things that I didn't quite get. The Hessian, Frankfurter, Berliner stuff was confusing. Or maybe Frankfurters are Hessians? To Wikipedia! Okay, yes they are. And wouldn't you know it but some of my ancestors were from Hesse, Darmstadt to be exact.. Course they were Jewish. Anyway the tone of the book is noir-ish at times with its barely scrapping by private detective going after the bad guys to settle a personal matter. The writing is wry, sly, and friendly though sometimes the sentences are a little convoluted. The main character, Kemal Kayankaya, goes after a protection racket when he and a buddy end up killing two of its members while helping a local businessman. He wants to know what's going on and why these two people had to die. He gets beat up a lot and blunders around investigating (seriously, I think most of it was less detective work and more being really lucky) until he reaches the conclusion. It was a decent book and Kemal was an interesting character. He was blunt, a little unethical, and grumpy but a decent guy for the most part.

I'm reading The Fire Engine that Disappeared and it's not as good as the first few books in the series but it's still a good read.

I watched District B13, a French action film written by the director of The Fifth Element and wow, this is an awesome movie. It's short and not too complicated; the fight scenes are highly watchable and the two main characters are pretty hot. This is not a movie to spend much time thinking about; it's pure entertainment. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance however, is a movie to think about. Done by the director of Thirst it tells a story about desperation and revenge and ultimately shows how the drive for payback can lead to utter annihilation. The actions of the characters just seem to send everything spiraling into a black void of nothingness. Again, it could have used editing. Long shots of people sitting around eating or staring into space can set the mood or show the mindset of a character but you need to distinguish between the necessary shots and the self-indulgent ones. Anyway, good movie and Oldboy is next.

I also watched a French zombie movie called The Horde because, well, French zombie movie. It was eh. The characters were mostly 2-d and the action was so-so. The plot was only half told. The one thing I found odd was when the African guy was killing the zombie who killed his brother. He started screaming about how he was Nigerian. I wasn't quite sure what his nationality had to do with anything. Maybe Nigerians have a reputation in France of being bad-ass? I don't know.

I would make a humorous obscure reference but I'm too lazy

Tenterhook: One of the hooks or bent nails set in a close row along the upper and lower bar of a tenter, by which the edges of the cloth are firmly held. OED.

A good word to know. To be on tenterhooks is to be stretched or strained like cloth hanging from hooks.

I handled very old and not-so-old books today and printed many pieces of paper. And I am thoroughly sick of winter.

I finished reading Le Clezio's Onitsha and I'm sorry to say but I'm terribly underwhelmed. It's not that it's a bad book. The writing is fine and he follows through on the plot but overall it's incredibly superficial. The characters are practically cut-outs. He has taken an outline of a person and filled them with vague personality traits. Reading about his characters is like viewing a person painted with broad strokes in watercolor. You get an idea of what they might look like but you wouldn't recognize them on the street. You could argue that Fintan, Maou, and Geoffrey are not as important as the setting. The town Onitsha is the main character except that mainly you follow Fintan and his parents and you actually see next to nothing of the people who live around them. There is nothing in this book that shows you that here, there is a community here of folk living their lives under colonial rule and they are human. They bargain in the market, the play silly games, they quarrel and throw tantrums and fall in love. They dream. None of that is here. They are broad strokes; gently laughing women and faded warrior men with faces like African masks and superhuman expressions. That last part disturbed me. This book has a whiff of the "noble savage" genre about it with its proud race of people whose traditions go back to the days when their ancestors left Egypt, who see gods in everything and eat funny, exotic foods. The mute woman who shows up in town with nothing becomes the embodiment of the river goddess, of the black queen who left her homeland to found a new one. Yeah, no. She was much more interesting when she was just a wary, mute woman learning to make friends with Maou. Turning the African characters into nothing more than the last remnants of a displaced people denies them of ordinary human expression.

Another problem I had with the writing was the way it never let things truly develop. In the beginning Maou doesn't like Onitsha. Then we read about Fintan learning about how to fit in, then suddenly we're back with Maou and she loves the place. Show some change don't just say "oh yeah, this happened." Everything was a little disjointed like that. Geoffrey's obsession with the "black queen of Meroe" comes out of nowhere and just muddles everything up.

A few small things:

- The role Sabin Rodes plays in the town is never made clear but he has a surprising amount of power. Maou's dislike for him is never explained and the reveal about him at the end made no sense. I'm probably missing something but I care so little for all of these rather vague characters.

- I know the French had colonies in Africa so why did this French author decide to set his story (which is ostensibly about colonial rule although it's more a back drop than a theme) in an English one?

- The book goes on too long. It starts with the journey to Africa and it should have ended with the journey back, not gone on to show where they are twenty years down the line. The story was about their stay in a country vastly unfamiliar to them. The foreign-ness of their surroundings lends the book a dream-like quality that breaks abruptly with the description of Fintan's later life in England. It also becomes surprisingly maudlin. I spent about the last ten pages rolling my eyes.

Maybe the river was the main character. It rolls on throughout the story as a great changeable but ever present beast. It sleeps just under the surface of everything the characters do and think. However, it would still be nice if the people could engage my attention.

So that was tl;dr but I'm glad to get that down. I'm trying to read "literature" and I've discovered that just because an author has won an award doesn't mean he's particularly good. Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe Onitsha is one of his more mediocre books. At least he knows how to use quotation marks.